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I pronounce char like I start the word “character.” Just makes more sense to me. And when I hear “pound”, I often think of £ and need to remind myself that a lot of folks mean the # character instead. Now, / is obviously not a backslash, that would be \. And I've yet to meet a native speaker of English who can pronounce TeX the way that Knuth's description calls for. :-) (But I guess native speaker of Greek would say the same thing about my pronunciation, so I'll keep quiet.)
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Christopher CreutzigOct 22 '10 at 8:11

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Next time I have to pronounce the \* character, I will use the word 'splat'. XD
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gablinOct 22 '10 at 9:06

I always found it amusing that for time immemorial SCSI was pronounced "scuzzy" but Apple tried in the late 80s-early 90s to pronounce it as "sexy". They lost that battle.
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Jesse C. SlicerOct 22 '10 at 20:15

18 Answers
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char may be pronounced both ways: like "char" in "charcoal", or close to "care"; never like "car"

! is an "exclamation point"

# is a "pound sign" (probably an Americanism)

* is an "asterisk" (never in 15 years heard anyone call it "splat")

RegEx with a hard "g" because it's regular, not rejular.

SQL: heard both "ess-queue-ell" and "sequel"; but (Microsoft's) SQL Server is much more often pronounced "sequel server".

bin is like a recycle bin; not "bine"

LaTeX's ancestor is TeX. The "tech" pronunciation goes all the way back to TeX's creator Donald Knuth. Actually the X was supposed to sound more like the German "ch" in Bach. "La-tech" is the only way LaTeX is pronounced in the US research community; if you pronounce it like a sort of rubber, you give away that you don't belong to it.

Like the first word of ``char *''. The accent is generally on the first syllable.

Some other pieces are funnier:

17.6: What's this ``white space'' I keep hearing about?

White space is a racist, segregational term. Implicitly, "dark" or "colored" space (i.e., the '_' character) is not good enough to separate tokens. More interestingly, the white space characters keep the other tokens apart. They say it's for parsing, but there's ample evidence the goal of white space is to keep the other characters from "taking over" the program. This is disguised by the description of C as "white space insensitive" - a simple ploy for sympathy.

char: "char", as in "charbroiled". It rhymes nicely with "star", so "char *" comes off as "char star".

!: Intriguing; I'm not sure I've ever pronounced this aloud. I'd probably say "exclamation point", to be honest, just to be clear.

#: "Hash", although sometimes in my head I also say "number".

*: "Star"

Regex: "REG-ex". It's interesting, since "regular" has a hard g, but I suppose the soft g flows better.

SQL: Maybe I differ from most people, but I say "sequel", except in the case of PostgreSQL. I've heard you can tell on what RDBMS programmers cut their teeth, as those who learned on SQL Server tend to say "sequel" and everyone else tends to say "ess cyoo ell". Not sure if that's true, but it's true in my case. :)

|: "Pipe". Duh. :)

bin: "bin" rhymes with "pin"

lib: "lib" as in "liberate"

etc: "ets-see", as in "slash ets-see". :)

/: "Slash". It annoys me when people call it a backslash, too -- so much that I wrote a blog post about it many moons ago.

Backslash? Are you serious? Its name is "barra retroversa"!!! :-)
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LorenzoOct 22 '10 at 11:26

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@Lorenzo, I finally found a workplace where variable names are in Italian! And all variables are global! This is just hilarious! Anyway LOL for 'barra retroversa' XD
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Federico CullocaOct 22 '10 at 16:58

GUI: gee-you-eye vs. "gooey". I always assumed it was the former, but I've heard several people (with far more professional credentials than mine, that being "barely amateur") refer to it the other way.

This gets me too, although I don't think many Americans pronounce the 'e' either, so it's more like rowt-r. To be fair, many Brits say root-uh or root-ah, some with more of a grunt than others.
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Alan PearceOct 22 '10 at 9:49

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Luckily, living in the States, you can say either pronunciation and you'll be understood just fine, but Americana can't be judged by songwriters in 1946.
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XepochOct 22 '10 at 14:37

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The root vs. rowt depends on region and context. For instance I may ask, "Which root did you drive going across country?", but ask, "Which rowt did you take home from work?"
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mellowsoonOct 22 '10 at 18:56

At a former job, we had a religious flamewar around the pronunciation of GIF. I argued that the G should be a hard-G because it represents the word Graphics. My colleagues argued that since the G is in front of an I, it should be a soft-G as in giraffe. They further argued that the creator of the format pronounces with a soft-G so we should take that as the final proof.

So, at that job, I was the author of our Output Run-Time module, abbreviated ORT. As the creator, I demanded that it be pronounced GIF with a hard-G. Some people hated me.

Watching the NFL Playoffs and saw that Audible Pepsi commercial and they said “backslash” and i about flipped! I get really bothered by this, so i decided to look it up and see if I’m the only one. Glad to see I’m not! What really bothers me is if you don’t even know, why would you even say “back” before you say “slash”? If I don’t know what color my boss’s car is but I know it’s a, say, Grand Am, I’m not going to say “My boss will be showing up in a red Grand Am.” I’d leave the “red” out of it! If you don’t know, just leave the “back” out of it! I wouldn't mind as much if they called a backslash a "slash", at least it's some kind of slash! What do they call a backslash? Sorry, it’s a pet peeve.

I taught myself programming and as a result I learned a ton of new words, without ever hearing people pronounce them. For instance, It wasn't until after programming for about 4 years(my senior year in high school) that I learned that syntax is sin-tax, not sine-tax.

Some things i consider a bit odd for me:

* = star (C code like *x=10 I pronounce like 'star Ex equals 10')

stdio = es-studio

stdlib = es-tee-dee-lib (lib as in libertarian)

# was pound to me until I started using C#, not I pronounce it both pound and sharp when reading code

& = and, including when it's really the address of operator

$ = string. This is from the first programming language I used(DarkBasic) where variable names prefixed with $ were string variables.

% = percent

! = not (even when reading command lines and such)

SQL = Sequel since last year where I started using it cause it's a lot easier for me to say than S Q L